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Ellen Makar of Yale-New Haven Health System, Conn., and Sandra Ng of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center were both selected by the Alliance for Nursing Informatics (ANI) to participate in a two-year Nursing Informatics Emerging Leaders Program.

ANI and its Nursing Informatics Emerging Leaders Program are jointly supported by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). According to HIMSS, this inaugural program aims to develop leaders capable of assuming leadership positions in the U.S. in an informatics-related organization.

Makar serves as a clinical coordinator in the decision support department at Yale–New Haven Health, where she retrieves and analyzes administrative health data for projects that require operational, clinical and financial decision-making. Makar will be paired with two mentors: Bonnie Westra, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and Carol Petersen of the Denver-based Association of periOperative Registered Nurses.

Ng is currently responsible for operating trials of hardware and applications in a clinical setting, redesigning workflow processes and evaluating impact of these innovations on various clinician workflows during routine patient care. Ng will be mentored by HIMSS Vice President of Informatics Joyce Sensmeier and Curtis Dikes, national director of clinical informatics technology integration at Oakland, Calif.-based payor Kaiser Permanente.

To fulfill their commitment to the program, each is expected to complete a nursing informatics leadership project, attend meetings of the ANI governing directors, as well as participate in the HIMSS annual conference and exhibition at Atlanta in March and in the AMIA annual symposium in November.